Thanks for posting Borge’s obit. My brother told me the other day in an email and I thought about putting something up but shied away for some reason. Due to the fact we’re here and wouldn’t make it to any service or memorial I decided I’d post a quick note.

My family and I got to know Borge really well over the years, I don’t say that to sound important, only to preface how much he did for us and especially my brother Greg and I. Greg was the first to leave Heidelberg and move to Salt Lake to be a photographer and started working for Borge. When the rest of us moved to Utah Borge took us all out for a meal and welcome. He gave my mom a glass bowl with a pewter lid in the shape of a small honeybee as a welcome gift to Utah and I remember thinking he was the classiest person I knew. During high school I used to come to Salt Lake on the weekends and hang out with Greg at work in the lab, he had started renting a large studio space upstairs in the Edison building from Borge at that time. After high school I moved to Salt Lake and Greg told me to just start working in the E-6 lab and eventually Borge would probably just start paying me. Looking back, it was actually kind of a jerk thing to do, but his response was indicative of Borge’s personality. He was always doing his best to give people the opportunity to work and was extremely flexible with workers coming and going. I still remember I was up from the E-6 lab picking up order folders from the baskets and he just came up, gave me the grouch look and asked me if I was working for him. I told him yes and he sent me to see Ane to get an employee number for clocking in and out. It didn’t take more than a day and a half to get a job. Writing this and thinking back about how generous he was to me and others working there at that time I feel a mixture of embarrassment and gratitude.

Besides from the knowledge I gained from working there, the opportunity to work with my brother Greg everyday and be around the others at the lab, not to mention afford school and living in the ‘big’ city, working for Borge were really special years in my life and very influential in deciding to pursue photography. It sounds cheesy but to me the lab he created was like a home back then, perhaps it was because I was fresh on my own after high school and the fellow lab rats and Borge became the new social circle. He helped me finance my mission to Germany and continued to help me in photography after moving back to Salt Lake. I’m positive that I am among many in the valley that were helped in many various ways in and outside of photography by him. Every time I have a Crown Burger or see a Mont Blanc pen in a shirt pocket I think of him.